INTRODUCTION

Professor Judith Gardam's distinguished record of scholarship speaks for itself. What is less well known is Judith's record as an inspiring teacher and colleague. To those of us who were fortunate to be her students, Judith conveyed not only her enthusiasm for, and commitment to, international law, but also her intellectual discipline. No student of Judith's could forget her admonitions on the importance to scholars of international law of striving to truly understand its sources. As a colleague, I found supervising doctoral candidates with Judith a pleasure because of her interest in their projects and her dedication to mentoring the next generation of scholars. The humanity that pervades Judith's scholarship and teaching is all the more powerful because of the rigorous and disciplined approach to the law which is her hallmark.

The limits of the powers of the Security Council have been the subject of considerable debate since the rise of the Security Council which accompanied the end of the Cold War. Notwithstanding the absence of any organ competent to engage in a review of the Council's decisions, and irrespective of the political character of many of its most important functions, the Council's powers are nonetheless not unlimited. Indeed, the recent practice to be examined in this chapter has demonstrated that its powers are subject to important collateral limits arising from the human rights obligations of states.

The response of international law to the rise of the Security Council was a topic addressed by Judith Gardam in her 1996 article in the Michigan Journal of International Law entitled ‘Legal Restraints on Security Council Military Enforcement Action’. Here, Gardam argued that, when undertaking military enforcement actions, the Security Council was bound by requirements of proportionality and necessity analogous to those applicable in the jus ad bellum, and also by the rules of international humanitarian law forming the jus in bello. This chapter looks not to uses of force, but to sanctions imposed by the Security Council. Nonetheless, two of Gardam's concluding observations make for a suitable starting point for this analysis. First, she noted the legal character of the Charter: